Second Nature

Aristotle taught that virtue is neither a feeling nor a piece of knowledge but a habit. No one is born honest or brave; we become so by doing honest and brave things until they come easily, the way a builder becomes a builder by building. Character, on this account, is second nature: not the nature we were given, but one we lay down act by act until it feels as fixed as the first.

The account has a hard edge that is easy to miss. If practice settles character, then the grown coward or liar may by now be unable to act well; the habit chooses for him. Is he still responsible? Aristotle answers with an image. A man who throws a stone cannot call it back, yet the throw is his, because it lay in his power not to throw. So with the drinker who could once have refused the early years of drinking, and the unjust man who could once have practiced justice instead. We are part-authors of our characters at the beginning, he argues, and therefore answerable for them at the end, even after the power to be otherwise is gone.

The claim unsettles two comfortable pictures at once. Against the optimist, it denies that a settled character can simply decide to be different today. Against the fatalist, it denies that a settled character was ever simply fate.